[cc-community] CC lawsuit?
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Thu Sep 21 10:17:42 EDT 2006
Stuart Spivack wrote:
> It looks like someone is going to file a suit over a Creative Commons
> work. A Northeast Ohio blogger claims that an Ohio candidate has
> inappropriately used a photograph in an attack ad. Here are a couple
> related posts from said blogger's ...er... blog:
[...]
> The photograph was licensed under BY-NC-ND. It was used in a
> television advertisement.
[...]
> I'm sure it's far too early to tell whether this will have any
> significant impact on the CC community. I think it's very likely that
> the parties responsible for the tv ad will back down from the threat
> and behave exactly as though the photograph were an
> all-rights-reserved copyrighted work. Does that in and of itself mean
> anything to the CC community? As I said, I'm not sure that the CC
> license holder is on solid ground in his interpretation of the
> license.
Sounds like the real point of this lawsuit is not proper attribution
or collection of royalties, but rather the suppression of the
opposition's speech. Shouldn't this be a question of fair use?
The use of copyright law, with or without the CC license, to suppress
political speech would be a terrible precedent.
Political speech is the most important kind to protect, and is the
real raison d'etre for the US 1st Amendment protection of
the freedom of speech. If you have the freedom of political speech,
you have the fundamental tool necessary to fight for any other
kind of speech, but without it, all democracy founders. It would
be unconscionable for CC to support such a perverse use of
copyright law.
I have some faith that they will see it that way, too.
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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